Breadcrumb

A Vanished America In Stereo

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes asserted “a slight claim on the gratitude of mankind” for inventing a cheap and handy device for viewing three-dimensional photographs. History is still in his debt for the craze he started and the pictures it has left behind

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes walked down Broadway one day in 1860 on an unorthodox errand for that distinguished physician, poet, and essayist. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table had a gadget to sell—a contrivance he had made himself—a stereoscope. Readers of the Atlantic Monthly were familiar with the fact that Dr. Holmes had become fascinated by the three-dimensional photography which had been introduced from England a few years before. He had published in June, 1859, an article explaining the theory of the stereoscope and describing his collection of pictures. “I pass, in a moment,” he wrote, “from the banks of the Charles to the ford of the Jordan and — in spirit I am looking down upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives.”

But he was so dissatisfied with the efficiency of the viewing instruments he was then able to get that he designed and constructed for himself a simpler one—the stereoscope we remember from childhood.

Up to that time there were two viewers known in the United States : a neat wedge-shaped box, sometimes equipped with adjustable lenses, and a much larger box designed to stand on a table. This had lenses at one side and a knob for turning an inner mechanism so that a series of slides could be examined. The first type, developed by Sir David Brewster following earlier models of Sir Charles Wheatstone and James Eliot, was first publicly shown at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. The revolving arrangement came from an American—Alex Beckers. Neither device admitted enough light to satisfy Yankee Dr. Holmes. He tinkered with them. He discarded the box cases and ended with a skeleton stereoscope consisting simply of the lenses shaded by a hood, adjustable holders for the twinpictured card, and a handle. He never applied for a patent and thus never profited from his invention ; he said later with a mixture of candor and professional restraint : “I believed that money could be made out of it. But, considering it as a quasi-scientific improvement, I wished no pecuniary profit—. All I asked was, to give it to somebody who would manufacture it for sale to the public.”

The idea had not been immediately appreciated. He offered his model first to the Washington Street dealers of Boston, and then to the Chestnut Street opticians of Philadelphia, but found that “they looked at the homely mechanism as a bachelor looks on the basket left at his door, with an unendorsed infant crying in it.” Now Holmes was in New York, hopeful that the great photographic supply house of Edward Anthony at 501l Broadway would appreciate the opportunity for both pecuniary and cultural gains. Alas, no. “Nothing could be more polite than the way in which they treated me,” he reported —and no wonder, for he was the foremost collector of stereoscopic pictures in the country, and the tireless publicist for Anthony’s productions; but they saw no merit in the new idea. Nor did another Broadway establishment which sold only instruments imported from London. “Of course I ought to have remembered,” fumed the Brahmin from the Hub of the Universe, “that in London they know all that we wretched provincials know, and ever so much more.” So Dr. Holmes, usually so cheerful, retired to Boston somewhat depressed.

But the story has a happy ending, for when he got home he found that one dealer, Mr. Joseph L. Bates, had been thinking over the matter pretty seriously—and had the sagacity to see that there was a future for the skeleton stereoscope.

When Dr. Holmes next wrote for the Atlantic about his stereoscope in July, 1861, he was in his customary buoyant mood: “It is no toy: it is a divine gift, placed in our hands by science.” Holmes foresaw great “stereographic libraries.” And, indeed, by 1869, skeleton stereoscopes were being used everywhere, and hundreds of American photographers were busily making money and spreading culture, as Dr. Holmes had hoped. To be sure, the “wretched provincials” preferred pictures of Niagara Falls or the Mount Washington Railway to the educational or foreign kind. But the Autocrat was rather proud of his contribution even so: “A slight claim on the gratitude of mankind is better than none, and I am content that mine should be classed somewhere in the same category as that of the young man who informed Mr. Dickens, with a flush of modest pride, that he was the son of the celebrated inventor of cold-drawn castor oil.”

In these days when brilliant color transparencies can be made by any amateur who possesses reasonable skill and one of the new stereoscopic cameras, the viewer has gone back in form to Sir David Brewster’s original model, perfected by the incorporation of an electric battery and light. People have lost sight of Dr. Holmes’s invention. Yet many of us owe him a debt for the hours of pleasure we had as children when we looked through his oldfashioned ’scope.

Until the 1890’s, when the halftone displaced the hand-etched wood or metal cut in newspaper and magazine illustrations, the stereoscope provided the only popular news photograph, and it had the added feature of the magic third dimension. The two-lensed camera went everywhere (albeit rarely on such odd perches as the bicycle handlebars shown here) and gave its customers a first, revealing glimpse of far places.

THE “INSTANTANEOUS VIEW

‘hen Dr. Holmes visited the Anthonys’ establishment they could have offered him a choice of 900 titles from their catalogue at $3 a dozen, or a dollar more if tinted by hand in natural colors. Though Anthonys’ was not the only publisher, a particular interest lies in the fact that they sold “instantaneous” pictures as well as conventional landscapes, even in the days of slow and cumbersome wet-plate photography.

They were the work of Henry T. Anthony, brother of Edward, the proprietor. His efforts had led to a secret developing process that became the envy of the whole profession, because he was able to make such short exposures that he could catch figures and vehicles in motion. Since Broadway was right outside his window, he took pictures of the traffic on Broadway—even on a rainy day. Thanks to Anthony we have a photographic record of such interesting news events in New York as the visits of the first diplomatic mission from Japan (bottom left), the young Prince of Wales and his suite, and the mammoth ship Great Eastern . And thanks to the stereo camera, which continued to record news and personalities for half a century, the record contains thousands of pictures like those shown here of famous men in action.

THE CIVIL WAR IN STEREO

The Civil War offered a great opportunity to the new stereoscopic trade, but the man who rose to meet it was not a landscapist at all, only a fashionable portrait “artist” of New York, Mathew Brady. To photograph such a vast affair was a daring project for Brady and his talented staff, the first American combat photographers. When the Army failed to subsidize him, Brady found the Anthony firm willing to extend credit; thus, indirectly, it is to the Anthonys that we owe the very existence of Brady’s great realistic war pictures.

HOMELY SENTIMENT

The homely side of the stereoscopic craze was the continuous production of sentimentals (like those on this page) and comics (overleaf). Sugary story-telling pictures made in Germany led the way for the best-sellers in this genre, the so-called “Stereoscopic Treasures” made by F. G. Weller of Littleton, New Hampshire, a town which had become the unchallenged stereo capital of the country in the 1870’s.

Weller issued some 350 “Treasures,” until his models were familiar in every American home. The dry plate had now supplanted the difficult wet one; many imitators flooded every crossroads with views. So great was the demand for the stereoscope itself that four factories in North Bennington, Vermont, alone were pouring out copies of the Dr. Holmes model.

With the exception of the slapstick 1902 scene above—is this Vassar? Smith? some less wholesome setting? will these girls meet any Ivy League parents after the Big Game?—the stereoscopic humor shown here comes from the same hand that produced “Reveries of a Bachelor,” F. G. Weller’s. If his sentiment was Germanic, his comedy was pure Yankee and poked fun at his small-town neighbors. Some ninety years later, his country choir, his village tooth-puller, his emancipated housewife and forlorn husband still strike a note of genuine folk humor.

YANKEE HUMOR

TRAVEL VIA STEREO

The photographer’s wagon, like that of J. A. French of Keene, N. H., above, who was ready to furnish you with anything, including stereoscopic views, has gone the way of the head gripper and the wet plate. Portable cameras killed it, as lantern slides, post cards, halftone printing, and finally moving images sent the stereoscope to the attic. Dr. Holmes’s “slight claim” had been strong for fifty years, half the age of his one-horse shay. It vanished almost as suddenly.

Nevertheless we have good reason for another kind of gratitude to him. His instrument was a primary cause in the practice and improvement of photography. People loved those pictures with the illusion of solidity, and mothers saved them for the children from generation to generation. Now, those of us for whom history is visual as well as intellectual cherish whatever old slides we can find. We wipe off the dust and fit them between the wire holders of Dr. Holmes’s stereoscope. With the hood around our eyes we are carried away, as he was—but not so much from the Charles River to the Jordan as from now to then.